Engagement/Developer/Newsletter

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October2012

Announcing WebPlatform Docs

Mozilla, along with a group of major Web-related organizations convened by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has announced the start of Web Platform Docs (WPD), a new documentation site for Web standards documentation, which will be openly-licensed and community-maintained. The supporting organizations, known as the “stewards,” have contributed an initial batch of content to the site from their existing resources. The body of content is very much in an alpha state, as there is much work to be done to integrate, improve, and augment that content. to achieve the vision of WPD as a comprehensive and authoritative source for Web developer documentation. The stewards want to open the site for community participation as early as possible. With your help, WPD can achieve its vision being a comprehensive and authoritative source for Web developer documentation.

Read more about WPD on the Hacks blog: Welcoming the new kid: Web Platform Docs.

Improving our Documentation Processes

We have a couple of things we're working on to help improve our documentation processes, and we need your help!

Proposing a New Documentation Process for Mozilla

As Mozilla has grown, the number of things needing developer documentation has skyrocketed, and the docs team can no longer keep up! In order to streamline our process for determining what needs to be written about and when, we have proposed a new documentation process which will require the development teams and writing team to work more closely together in the future.

If you're a Mozilla developer, you need to read this blog post and the corresponding proposal. Be sure to comment on the blog post or email the developer documentation team lead with your feedback.

Looking for Subject Matter Experts

It’s rare, when writing documentation, that questions don’t arise. When writing documentation, we try to avoid hassling the engineers with questions, but it’s almost inevitable that we’ll run into something we’re not able to figure out on our own. When that happens, we need to know who to contact with our question.

And, all too often, we have no clue at all who we should reach out to. We’ll ask blindly on IRC and sometimes (but not as often as we’d like) get the answer we seek. Then we’ll ask on mailing lists. Often that’s a dead end. Then we resort to emailing people at random until the answer is found.

If you can help build this list to ensure that we can find the right people to talk to when we have questions about a technology, you can not only improve the writing team's ability to get its job done, but you'll help us improve the quality of the documentation about your hard work!

Dev Derby Update

Recent winners

The winners of the No JavaScript Challenge and the Camera API Dev Derby have been announced. Congratulations to our winners and all other contributors!

Upcoming Derbies

CSS Media Queries II

Accepting submissions now! Ends September 31 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

CSS Media Queries have come a long way in the last year. Now a W3C Recommendation, media queries help you support the ever-expanding variety of screen sizes and resolutions in use today. Smart phones and feature phones, tablets and e-book readers, short screens, tall screens, and super-high-resolution screens -- the Web is growing, shrinking, and changing every day.

Building a Web app that works well across this spectrum can seem daunting, but we have you covered. Take a look at this introduction from former Derby judge Chris Coyier and be sure to head over to the MDN for more depth and more up-to-date information after that. Need help testing your creation? The new Responsive Design View of Firefox Developer Tools makes debugging responsive web designs fast, easy, and fun.

Some great demos were shared in our last Derby on this topic. What can you do with CSS Media Queries?

Full Screen API

Accepting submissions now! Ends November 30 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

With the Full Screen API, you can escape the confines of the browser window. You can even detect full screen state changes and style full screen pages specially. Talk about immersive!

Offline

Accepting submissions now! Ends December 31 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

With the maturing offline capabilities of the open Web, you can build apps that work with or without an Internet connection. With offline technologies, you can better support travelers and mobile users, improve performance, and more.

Apps Developer Hub | Mozilla Marketplace

please don't publish unless this ships after Aug 30 and the site is live

The alpha version of the Apps Developer Hub launches August 30 on the Mozilla Marketplace, with a growing collection of tools and resources for HTML5 app developers, including the new UI SDK (X-tags), a guide to design best practices for developers, and more. Start building apps now for the Firefox OS ecosystem - become part of the Open Web Apps community.

July 2012


August 2012

Promote MDN WordPress Plugin

Do you like MDN and run a WordPress site? We made a WordPress Plugin to Promote MDN.

It is based on WordPress developer extraordinaire freediver's excellent SEO Smart Links plugin. The plugin automatically and transparently links keywords and phrases to MDN. The keywords and phrases are determined by a special Promote-MDN page on the MDN wiki. It has plenty of configurable features - links in RSS feeds, open links in new window, setting exceptions and limits, and adding your own custom keywords. It's initially available in English, Deutsch, Español, Nederlands, Polski, Português (do Brasil).

We'd love to hear your feedback on the dev-mdn mailing list. The code is on github if you want to send us bug reports and suggestions.

MDN wiki gets a brain transplant

The Mozilla Developer Network's wiki, which used to run on the MindTouch platform, is now running on the Mozilla-built Kuma platform. Based on the Kitsune platform that powers SUMO, this new wiki system provides incredible performance, flexibility, and power. On top of all that, because we built it, we have a great deal of capability to update and improve it. In fact, it's already been upgraded three times since we launched it at the end of July!

If you're curious about the new system, check out Getting started with Kuma. If you'd like to learn more about the KumaScript language that provides scriptable templates for the wiki, have a look at Introduction to KumaScript.

The MDN writing community sends a tip of the hat and an enormous "thank you" to our development team: Luke Crouch, Les Orchard, James Bennett, David Walsh, and Craig Cook. Bonus kudos go out to these folks in IT and WebOps: Jake Maul, Jason Thomas, Chris Turra, and Sheeri Cabral. And of course, don't forget the guys in QA and security that tested this stuff for us: Stephen Donner, Raymond Etornam, and Adam Muntner.

These guys worked very hard -- sometimes too hard -- for the last few months. We're easing off a bit to let them catch their breath, but we have lots of excellent new stuff coming!

Dev Derby Update

June winners

The winners of the WebGL Derby have been announced. Congratulations to these winners and to all competitors!


Upcoming Derbies

Camera API
Ends August 31 at 11:59pm Pacific Time. Submit today!

Say cheese!

The Camera API lets you access the cameras of mobile devices (with the user's permission, of course!). By using the Camera API, you can help users take photos (or retrieve existing ones) and upload them to a web page easily. No Browse button and no digging through obscure file names. This is totally seamless photo sharing.

The Camera API was born out of Mozilla's WebAPI project, but has already gained support across browsers. Users of Firefox for Android, Chrome for Android, and recent versions of the stock Android Browser can already reap the benefits.

Mozilla's Robert Nyman has written a great article on using the Camera API and a live demo of it. Unfortunately, little other creative work has been done with this powerful technology. That's where you come in. What can you do with the Camera API? Show us this month in the August Dev Derby!

Geolocation & Camera API
Accepting submissions now! Ends September 31 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Wish you were here!

With Geolocation, you can get the user's physical location. With the Camera API, you can access their mobile camera. What can you do by combining the two? People, places, photos. Go!

CSS Media Queries II
Accepting submissions now! Ends September 31 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Size still matters

CSS Media Queries are now a common tool for responsive, mobile-first web design. They are now even a W3C Recommendation! They can tell you a lot more about a display than just its width. What can you do with Media Queries?


=== Apps Developer Hub | Mozilla Marketplace === please don't publish unless this ships after Aug 30 and the site is live

The alpha version of the Apps Developer Hub launches August 30 on the Mozilla Marketplace, with a growing collection of tools and resources for HTML5 app developers, including the new UI SDK (X-tags), a guide to design best practices for developers, and more. Start building apps now for the Firefox OS ecosystem - become part of the Open Web Apps community.

July 2012

MDN Kuma Update

The new MDN wiki platform, Kuma, which leverages the Kitsune codebase and will replace Deki, is scheduled to launch on July 16. More information on the kuma wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/MDN/Kuma

FISL - Porto Alegre, 25-28 July

  • Community Dinner: 24 July
  • MDN Apps Hack Day: 27 July on site at FISL with Christian Heilmann, Jeff Griffiths, Shez Prasad, John Hammink, Artur Adib and many more! Learn about DevTools and Hacking on Apps.
  • Docs Localization Sprint: 28 July on site at FISL with Sheppy
  • Community Work Day: 29 July in Porto Allegre

Additional events in Brazil:

  • July 27: MDN Apps Hack Day at FISL (Porto Alegre)
  • July 28: MDN Documentation & Localization Sprint at FISL (Porto Alegre)
  • July 29: Campus Party Brazil Keynote by Christian Heilmann and John Hammink (Recife)
  • August 1: Developer Meet Up (Sao Paulo)
  • August 2: Evangelism Reps Training (Sao Paulo)
  • August 22 & 23: The Next Web (Sao Paulo)
  • August 30 & 31: BrazilJS (Porto Alegre)
  • September 1: MDN Developer Meetup & Doc Sprint (Porto Alegre)
  • MDN Event Calendar - track Mozilla Developer Network hack days, doc sprints and meetups in Brazil and around the world

Upcoming Dev Derbies

July: No JavaScript

Code with no.js!

Who needs JavaScript? The expanding capabilities of HTML and CSS make it easier than ever to create rich user experiences for the Web. Mark Pilgrim captures this in Dive into HTML5 when he advises, "Scripting is here to stay, but should be avoided where more convenient declarative markup can be used." Today, declarative markup can be used to accomplish more than ever.

Dynamically adapt to different screen sizes using CSS media queries. Make a page come alive with CSS transitions and animations. Create eye-popping graphics and animations with 3D transforms. Warn users about invalid input with HTML form validation. Provide rich media with graceful fallbacks using HTML5 video and audio. The open Web lets you do all of this and more, all without a single line of JavaScript.

So hold the JavaScript and show us what you can do this month in the July Dev Derby!

August: Camera API

Say cheese!

The Camera API lets you access (with permission) the cameras of mobile devices. With the Camera API, users can easily take pictures and upload them to your web page.

September: Geolocation & Camera API

Wish you were here!

With Geolocation, you can get the user's physical location. With the Camera API, you can access their mobile camera. What can you do by combining the two? People, places, photos. Go!

Mobile Web Development best practices

Note
I'm not sure what content is applicable for this newsletter but, if it does fit, I would like to see us showcase some mobile Web development docs and events as part of the mobile Web compatibility effort.

Beyond the Code

As you probably know, Mozilla is a not-for-profit organization. So if the bottom line is not what drives our efforts, what is it? What are the motives behind the code we write? This is what we're trying to answer in Beyond the Code, a blog that shows why and how people engage with Mozilla. In short, it's for the betterment of the Web. But make sure to read Beyond the Code for more details on community, standards, events and open-source code and how this all works together!

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